The Crown Plaza Hotel did us proud with Lynne’s breakfast. The duty chef like the guy the night before being meticulous about the detail of what was safe. So we stoked up for the day and got our money’s worth. But boy! The bill considering it was just extras; dinner for two, a few drinks and breakfast (this was not included in the Reward Points booking) made it surprisingly expensive! At a Crown Plaza I guess you have to expect that.
Found MAVP (what was Males) no problem. Checking in was a breeze before being taken to Terminal 3. The airport was nice and quiet so check in and security were easy. I have Titanium! We had time for a cuppa before heading for the Gate.
The flight from Manchester to Heathrow was 30 minutes late taking off but only 15 minutes late landing at Heathrow. The blurb about the transfer said to allow 120 minutes between T5 and T3 but in the post Easter quiet it only took 30 minutes. So we had plenty of time for another cuppa. The gate at Heathrow for the flight to Lisbon was posted early but we then had to wait as “there was a problem disembaking the previous flight”. I really wish Lynne had not read that e-horoscope saying she might take a circuitous route and arrive late! In the end we took off 30 mins late but landed at Lisbon only 15 minutes late.
On our way out of the airport we went to the Tourism desk to collect the Lisboa Cards only to find that with all the excitement of the payment failure etc that I’d forgotten to print the voucher out. We tried to e-mail it, find a working WiFi point (thank heaven I decided last minute to take my laptop with me) and buy a memory stick. All fruitless so an hour later we left in a taxi for the hotel.
The hotel turned out to be a quite quaint place with loads of character. We tried to get the Lisboa Card voucher printed out at the hotel but again failed. The version from the hotel lobby internet computer was missing all its graphics but appeared to contain all the relevant information. An attempt to print PDF’s from my external hard disk also failed. (It was the following day I realised that I’d given them a Mac format disk to attach to a Windows PC!) But we had the funny format voucher. It was now past nine and the restaurant was about to close so we decided to get into dinner. The staff were really friendly and the Maitre’d was really helpful to Lynne. So we had a great dinner, discovering a particularly nice label of Vinho Verde. We then had a few post-prandial ports, chatting with a nice Portugese guy, Louise, who was working on a MacBook Pro in the bar. When I dug out my MacBook Pro to look at the voucher problem again he bought us a 20 year old vintage port to try because we were obviously good people with a MacBook Pro and iPhones. We ended having a couple more of those as well before going to bed relaxed and tired.